


The Great Continent

by heartofthesunrise



Category: Led Zeppelin
Genre: M/M, Sharing a Bed, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-02
Updated: 2014-11-02
Packaged: 2018-08-12 12:08:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,223
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7934062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heartofthesunrise/pseuds/heartofthesunrise
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He blinked and looked up when Jimmy slid into place next to him, and they smiled at one another. Two old men, John thought.</p><p>-</p><p>Or, Jimmy and Jonesy feel sentimental at a funeral together. Originally posted @bonzobreakbeat on tumblr in 2014</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Great Continent

Big Jim died on a Tuesday. The funeral was set for the following Saturday, in Billingshurst, a good drive from London. When John got the news he arranged for one of his suits to be drycleaned and pressed, and he stood on the front porch to call Jimmy.  
  
“Page,” he said, when Jimmy picked up, because he’d never gotten out of the habit. “How are you?”  
  
They exchanged small talk. Pleasantries. Finally John broached the subject hanging unspoken between them. “Are you going to the funeral?”  
Jimmy sighed, and it crackled against the phone receiver and into John’s ear. “It wouldn’t be right not to.” A pause. “You’d think it’d get less, you know, weird. People dying.”  
  
“I never thought he would.” John laughed a little. “Doesn’t suit him a bit.” A companionable silence fell between them, travelling the miles to connect them, thin as silk. “Listen, Page, I was gonna drive down on Friday night if you want to come with.”  
  
Jimmy paused, and John could almost see the way he would chew his lip while he searched for the right words, the crease that notched in his brow. “You sure?” he asked.  
  
“I’ll pick you up at six.”  
  
He hung up and stuffed the phone back in the pocket of his jeans, and went to pack.  
  
On Friday afternoon he drove to the tower house and Jimmy clambered into the passenger seat, hanging a suit in a plastic dry-cleaners’ bag beside John’s similar one and throwing an overnight bag into the backseat.  
  
“Good to see you,” he said, awkward.  
  
“I’m,” John paused, shifting into drive and pulling away from the curb. “I’m glad you’re coming with me.”  
  
They drove, for the most part, in silence. John had a good playlist queued up and they hesitantly sang along to Bo Diddley, Sonny Boy Williamson, Howlin’ Wolf.  
  
“Were you on the Sonny Boy Williamson session?” Jimmy asked abruptly.  
  
“I don’t think so,” John replied, hands easy on the wheel.  
  
“I must’ve bragged, though.” Jimmy turned in his seat. “I must’ve been insufferable.”  
  
“That was you about everything, Page.” John laughed. “I could never catch a break.”  
  
“You were a good sport.” Jimmy smiled, the lines around his eyes crinkling. “I mean I couldn’t believe most of the things you’d done before you started sessions.”  
  
It was John’s turn to laugh. “Just makin a living, innit?”  
  
“Guess so.” Jimmy fiddled with the hem of his shirt. The motion was so childlike, so entirely unsuited for the white haired, gracefully aging rock god aesthetic Jimmy worked so hard to preserve, that John could have cried.  
  
“Do you remember,” he began, unsure of where to direct the rest of the sentence, but desperate to break the silence, “Mickie Most’s holiday party? The first one?”  
  
Jimmy smiled. Deep lines carved out around his mouth, and his nose crinkled, and from where John was observing him in the corner of the rear-view, it was impossible not to see the ghost of the young man he had been.  
  
“God,” Jimmy said. “Yeah… Big Jim snuck that whiskey out through the window to us, we were so bored.” There was more to the story, of course, than that, but John was happy enough to let sleeping dogs lie. There were lots of things they didn’t talk about, after all.  
  
“He was a good chap,” John said, finally, and Jimmy hummed something in agreement, pressing the side of his face to the window.  
  
Moments passed. They drove along the edge of an apple orchard, the sun setting behind it and flashing through the gaps between the rows of trees. Later, after dusk had fallen in earnest, John chanced a longer look over at his companion. Jimmy was sleeping with his whole body slumped against the passenger-side door, his mouth open just slightly. A few wavy strands of silvery hair had worked free of the knot he wore at the nape of his neck, and they hung over his face, catching the light of the street lamps whisking past.  
  
Jimmy did not wake until a gentle deceleration stirred him, as John pulled off the freeway and into Billingshurst. He had made arrangements at a quiet B&B, someplace they might not be recognized, or at least where they might be left relatively alone.  
  
They had a small suite, two cozy rooms and an ensuite bath connected by a small parlor with a loveseat and a fireplace. John set his things down and got a fire going - it was only October but the whistling wind outside and the starless night sky hinted at a criminally early winter. And, he reflected, Jimmy got cold easily. Or at least, he had, back then.

As he stoked the fire, memories came unbidden of the Christmas party. 1965, or 1966 maybe? He and Jimmy, at the perpetual kids’ table of life, it seemed, had snuck out of Mickie Most’s house to stand on the wide veranda, dusted with snow. They had wanted share a cigarette and a drink, courtesy of Big Jim Sullivan himself, who passed them a bottle of Old Crow through the bathroom window, bless his heart. Jimmy had leant on the railing and looked across the grounds, where bare trees stood adorned with fresh, untouched snow. He had exhaled a long stream of smoke, and shivered, and passed the cigarette back to John before taking a long pull from the whiskey bottle.  
  
“Freezing, innit?” he had asked, and John, drunk enough for the moment, had wrapped his arms around him from behind, and leaned in close. He had pressed his cold cheek to Jimmy’s and whispered something dumb and sappy and entirely true, and when they had gotten cold enough to want to rejoin the party, they noticed the mistletoe hanging above the front door.  
  
John had laughed at the absurdity of it, the little green sprig compelling them forward, the cherry-red tips of their noses bumping in their haste. He had giggled against Jimmy’s mouth and his breath had fogged the air around them, and they had laced together their stiff, ungloved fingers and offered each kiss like a confession or a prayer.  
  
John added another splintery split log to the fire and stood. His knees popped, but they always did, these days. He could see Jimmy in the next room bending over his suitcase, rearranging things, his scarf still wound tightly around his neck.  
  
He sat on the loveseat and pulled out his phone, checking for messages. There were none, but he scrolled back anyway - a picture of a sunset from Jacinda, who was travelling; a message from Robert from late September, when they always made time for a phonecall; a series of unintelligible emoticons from Dave. He blinked and looked up when Jimmy slid into place next to him, and they smiled at one another. Two old men, John thought.  
  
Jimmy had a bottle of complimentary cabernet sauvignon in his hands, a good vintage, and he held it out to John with an inquiring raise of the eyebrow.  
  
“I thought you didn’t drink,” John said. Even he had mostly given it up, but a glass of wine or a scotch on occasion was an indulgence he would not deny himself.  
  
“Well. Not often,” Jimmy admitted. One corner of his mouth quirked up as if to say, _but since it’s here, and we’re here_ …  
  
John rose to fetch a pair of glasses and a corkscrew, and they poured immodest glasses and toasted to Big Jim. The conversation flowed after that - there were no shortage of stories from their session days, and after, when Big Jim had faithfully made his way to dozens of early Zeppelin gigs around England, driving for miles, playing the proud father.

Jimmy’s face grew more and more flushed, in the heat from the fire, from laughing. He dabbed at his eye with the corner of his sleeve to stop a tear of mirth from leaking. In the calm that descended - their wine glasses set aside, their bodies turned inward, towards one another, close - Jimmy realized that their hands were touching. Not quite clasped, just John’s loose fist curled in the curve of his own palm. He closed his fingers over John’s hand, gently, gently, and raised his eyes to consider the man in front of him.  
  
John’s face had lost none of its seriousness with age - the sharp angles of his cheekbones, which had lined his face even as a young man, now stood in sharp relief, the curved parentheticals around his mouth meeting them smoothly. His nose was as straight and pointed and sharp as it had ever been, but there had been some softening around his eyes. He had lost the panicky, anxious stare Jimmy had so often associated with him as a teenager, desperate to be taken seriously, seeking constant approval. Jimmy couldn’t help but think of how Big Jim would have been proud, had always thought John was too eager-to-please, in their sessions together at Pye.  
  
John looked at their hands, cupped together. “He was the first one we told, wasn’t he?” he asked. “Or, the first one to find out, at any rate.”  
  
Jimmy nodded. He was remembering that Christmas, too - the mistletoe, the bad whiskey. The moment after the kiss, when he had sunk his face against John’s neck and breathed deep, the scent of his cologne, the wet wool fragrance of his navy blue scarf. Big Jim had opened the door, then, and caught them, but turned away and asked no explanation.

“John, I - ” he started, unsure what to say but painfully aware that a moment between them was slipping past him, water through open fingers.  
  
“We don’t have to talk about it,” John interrupted. He brought his other hand to cover Jimmy’s and they stayed like that, not looking at each other but gazing disconnectedly at the vanishing point where their hands connected. John might’ve been blushing, or he might’ve been overwarm from the fire, or tipsy.  
  
“I miss you, you know,” Jimmy said finally, focusing his gaze on a patch of John’s flushed cheek.  
  
John’s fingers closed around Jimmy’s wrist and pulled him closer, and for a moment they were both startlingly sure they were going to kiss. They approached each other as a speeding car might approach the edge of a cliff, unstoppable, embracing the wide open expanse of sky just beyond. And yet, even as it seemed past the point of no return, Jimmy, or John, neither could be sure, moved instead to catch the other in an embrace. Their knees bumped clumsily between them. Jimmy hooked his blunt chin over John’s shoulder, his cheek pressed to the strong column of his neck.  
  
When finally they broke apart, in increments, the way cloth frays and separates, their hands remained just joined. “We should sleep,” John said. For the first time in god knows how long - years? decades? - he held Jimmy’s gaze. He examined the familiar old ache behind his ribs, rusty and vivid as a sepia photobooth strip.  
  
“John,” Jimmy started again, and couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of it all, at how goddamn uptight he’d gotten in his old age. “Can I - ”  
“You don’t have to ask.”  
  
They stood, hand in hand, and walked together to John’s bed. Jimmy took off his scarf and worried about the loose skin on his neck. He took off his jacket and sighed down at the soft flesh of his stomach and remembered what it was like to be justified in his vanity - to be beautiful. John had managed to stay lean and muscular and solid, and Jimmy watched his shoulderblades slide under his t-shirt as he took off his jeans. They undressed not like old lovers, or friends, but with the shyness and embarrassment of adolescents, entirely unsuited to their bodies.

John waited to look up at Jimmy until they had both undressed to their boxers and t-shirts, and recognized the uncertainty in the older man’s eyes right away. He had seen it there after their first kiss, during the first time they made love, when he had asked him to join Zeppelin. He patted the space on the bed next to him and Jimmy moved closer, and sat, and rested his head uneasily on John’s shoulder a moment before they pulled back the duvet together and tucked themselves in, not quite touching anymore. John turned off the bedside lamp, plunging the room into darkness.  
  
“Page,” John said, and wished he hadn’t. He had willed himself into a distance so palpable that Jimmy’s first name felt foreign on his tongue. “Jim,” he tried, again. He reached out in the dark to find Jimmy’s hand and pulled himself closer, fitting his body against the gentle curve of Jimmy’s side.  
  
When they were young they had slept together on studio couches, in boarding house beds - on one memorable night, even, on a blanket spread out on the beach, barely out of reach of the high tide. They had fit together like puzzle pieces, or the connected coasts of two continents before Pangaea’s drift. Jimmy cradled John’s body - slim and wiry and so familiar he could just about cry - against his chest. There was plenty to say, and yet, as they sank further towards sleep, they knew none of it needed to be said. It could be shown, in time.


End file.
